Part 23 (1/2)

In one notable case, Bowles had told the judge: If you don't do something-imprison this guy or ask him to leave Armstrong-he'll kill me. He'll find me in some public park or some place and go after me and there won't be anything I can do about it. If you don't do something-imprison this guy or ask him to leave Armstrong-he'll kill me. He'll find me in some public park or some place and go after me and there won't be anything I can do about it.

Flint downloaded that information as well. Then he went into the deeper tier of court cases. The defamation cases, the plagiarism cases, the breach-of-contract suits. They revealed an interesting pattern: InterDome settled the defamation cases, apparently as part of its cost of doing business. It defended Bowles in the plagiarism cases, and always won.

It initiated the breach-of-contract suits itself against Bowles. She never answered in court, and the cases were dropped.

Flint would have to investigate to see if those were simply negotiation tactics for a new contract or if they were something else entirely.

”G.o.d,” Talia said after their fourth plate of spaghetti-the last three having left the table untouched, ”she lived a really messy life.”

”Most people do,” Flint said.

Although most people's lives weren't this messy. He was finding this wealth of legal information on Bowles rea.s.suring. It meant that there were so many possible causes of her death that he didn't worry quite as much about his own case anymore.

But he wasn't going to relax. Not yet.

He didn't want to let down his guard and have something awful happen to Talia.

”It seems every time we look at this stuff, there's more,” Talia said.

”And we've only been looking at criminal and business cases,” Flint said. ”There's nothing personal yet.” ”I thought there wouldn't be,” Talia said.

”Divorce decrees are legal doc.u.ments. So are marriage certificates, if they were issued here in Armstrong.”

”Do you want me to look for those?” she asked.

He liked that better than having her dig through the history of a stalker. ”Yeah. Look for any marriages, divorces, domestic partners.h.i.+ps, or birth records with her name on them. Then let's get a sense of her family.”

”You think that's more important than some stalker?” He looked across the table at his daughter. He didn't want to tell her that most murders were simple things, caused by some trauma within the family.

”I think they could be as important as some stalker,” he said. ”And more than that, I think the more we know about Ki Bowles, the better off we all are.”

Too bad he hadn't thought of that when he hired her.

Too bad he'd hired her at all.

34.

Maxine Van Alen was prepping her closing arguments for a child custody case involving the daughter of a Disappeared when the lights in her office flickered-and went out.

Her computer network remained up, however, giving dim light to the rest of the room. The office network was on a secondary grid, one that had pa.s.swords and locks and all kinds of protections, things for which she once thought she paid too much and now knew she hadn't paid enough.

She reached for her desk, meaning to feel her way out of the room, when the lights came back up. She stood, her hand on the desk and her heart pounding.

The lights had done that same thing two years ago when an explosion had blown a hole in the dome. But she had heard the concussion-and worse, she had felt it. It had knocked her to the ground, even though it was nowhere near her offices.

This silent flickering somehow bothered her more.

Before she called her a.s.sistant, she checked the screen that was connected to her office network. Nothing seemed different than it had before.

Which bothered her. Shouldn't it have been different? Shouldn't something have shown up when the backup system kicked in?

She pressed a chip on her wrist. Her interoffice link flared to life, chirruping as it did.

”Find me the best tech we have in the office at the moment,” she said.

Then she signed off before her a.s.sistant had time to say anything.

Van Alen walked around her office, checking for other problems. Her hands were shaking, which bothered her. Usually nothing rattled her.

But this had.

She looked at the nonnetworked computers, where Flint often did his research. They remained off. She wasn't about to turn them on, not yet. Then she went to the window, and peered out at the street below.

People continued to walk by as if nothing had gone wrong. She heard no horns or sirens or screams, like she had that day the explosion had rocked the dome.

She heard nothing at all, and she should have, if other places suffered something similar. That uneasiness grew. Was this power loss unique to her building? She touched her chip again. ”And send me the office manager as well as someone from maintenance. Someone human.”

Maintenance had a lot of androids and bots, as well as a few college students who worked in the nonlegal areas, approved through alien student visas. She never let the aliens upstairs. They had no keys and no real knowledge of what went on up here.

She hoped.

Obadiah Mankoff, Van Alen's office manager, peeked around the raised doors. He was slender to the point of gauntness and no matter how much Van Alen fed him, he never seemed to gain weight. His hair was thinning, too. It was as if he couldn't acquire any more substance than he already had.

”No,” he said, ”I don't know what caused it. Give me some time and I'll figure it out.” ”Nothing on the public news nets?” Van Alen asked.

”Nothing that I've found. It's only been about two minutes since we had the glitch, Maxine.”

He could talk to her like that because he was the most efficient employee she'd ever had. He'd worked his way up from low-level maintenance where he started ten years ago to office manager just six months before-just after Flint went through his marathon sessions of research here in the office.

Mankoff had been one of the few upper-level employees who hadn't questioned Van Alen about the man she was keeping in her office.

She had liked that discretion. Mankoff treated everything Van Alen did as normal, even if it wasn't. ”I'm wondering if this is isolated to us,” Van Alen said.

”Why would that be?” Mankoff asked.

Van Alen wasn't going to tell him about Bowles or the research or Flint's fears for all of their safety. But she was going to make sure Mankoff took this little light flicker seriously.

”Send someone around the neighborhood to see if the other buildings had an issue,” Van Alen said. ”And make sure that tech gets here.”

”Did something malfunction?” Mankoff asked.

”That's the point. Something didn't malfunction at all,” Van Alen said. ”Didn't you notice? The office network didn't go down at all.”

”It's on a separate grid,” Mankoff said.

”Within the building,” Van Alen said. ”If the power went out in the neighborhood, everything should have s.h.i.+fted-even momentarily-to backup energy.”